Category: Nutrition and Lifestyle

Celebrity besties like Reese Witherspoon and Naomi Watts have paired up to practice yoga together and we wholeheartedly applaud them. Working out with a pal is a great way to stay motivated, achieve your fitness goals and most importantly, make working out fun.

So do as the stars do and schedule a workout date with your bestie:

1. You’ll get fit faster

Don’t worry if your workout buddy is in better shape than you. Working out with someone who’s at a higher fitness level than you can cause you to push yourself harder, meaning you’ll see results faster. According to a small 2012 study, published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, college women performed better on aerobic tasks, like bike riding, when they were told stopping early would hurt their partner’s performance.

We’ve all been there; that moment when we calm down and realize that our emotions just completely took over our bodies and caused us to behave in a way that we now regret.

While this is natural and human, the frequency of this experience is completely contingent upon how we’ve learned to regulate our emotions on a regular basis.

The reality is that how we identify, accept and overcome emotions is entirely within our control. We don’t need to become slaves to our feelings—riding the unpredictable waves of emotional highs and lows. Instead, we can reflect on some of the things that people with more emotional control don’t do — and try to stop doing these things ourselves.

Here are seven things that people with emotional control simply don’t do:

We all have that friend that somehow jumps out of bed at the first chime of her alarm, and gets started with her packed day with a perky attitude. If she does it without a drip of coffee, it’s even more maddening.

For the rest of us, productivity before noon feels like an impossible goal, and the snooze button is at once our arch nemesis and savior. We dream of what life would be like if we could actually get stuff done before heading into the office—imagine how many more happy hours you could make it to if you got your workout in before the day started.

If you’re naturally a night owl, there’s a chance you may never love the morning. “But you can stop hating the morning,” says Norman Rosenthal, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine and author of The Gift of Adversity. “You can stop being dysfunctional in the morning,” which for many people, is a necessity to keep their jobs, or get up and tend to their young kids.

To help you start your mornings on a happier note, we talked to experts to learn how we can do as the mythical morning people do.

A daily dose of good bacteria can boost your health, but not all foods containing probiotics are created equal. Find out which are the best to add to your diet.

You’ve probably heard the term “probiotics” thrown around in your doctor’s office or grocery store, especially regarding some staple foods in your kitchen, includingyogurt, kefir, and kimchi. You might’ve also caught wind that probiotics are living microorganisms (including common bacterial strains like Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium as well as yeast), but not the scary kind that make you sick. It’s the opposite: Probiotics support proper body function by stimulating the immune system, promoting digestion, inhibiting growth of potentially harmful bacteria that lead toinfections, and producing key nutrients, such as B vitamins and folate. That’s not all: Probiotics have also shown to alleviate diarrhea and constipation, decrease the duration of colds, aid weight loss, and lower cholesterol and blood pressure levels.

Naturopathic physicians combine the wisdom of nature with the rigors of modern science. Steeped in traditional healing methods, principles and practices, naturopathic medicine focuses on holistic, proactive prevention and comprehensive diagnosis and treatment. By using protocols that minimize the risk of harm, naturopathic physicians help facilitate the body’s inherent ability to restore and maintain optimal health. It is the naturopathic physician’s role to identify and remove barriers to good health by helping to create a healing internal and external environment.

Sleep: the great equalizer. It’s our proverbial “reset switch”. We quite literally can’t live without it, and yet societal pressures often force us to forego sufficient sleep in lieu of a perpetual need to accomplish more:make more money, have more friends, make more of ourselves. This desire to acquire comes at tremendous cost though: less long-term quality of life. The quantity and quality of sleep we get is connected to the dietary choices we make, and in a cyclical fashion those same dietary choices can impact how we sleep. Finding a way to break this cycle is a crucial step in regaining optimal health for those who get less-than-optimal rest.

“The quantity and quality of sleep we get is connected to the dietary choices we make, and in a cyclical fashion those same dietary choices can impact how we sleep.”

Want to promote healthy skin and proper digestion? Interested in a natural detoxifier? Water is a basic necessity. The body is more than two-thirds water, and keeping it hydrated is vital. Other reasons to have water as a regular part of your day include:

1. Healthy blood and bones.

Your blood is over 80 percent water and your bones are over 50 percent water. Proper hydration is required to optimize creation of new blood and bone cells.

Beat burnout by making more time for the activities and people that matter most to you.

If you’re finding it more challenging than ever to juggle the demands of your job and the rest of your life, you’re not alone.

Many people are putting in extra hours, or using their smartphones to be on call when they’re not physically at work.

“A lot of people are having a more difficult time finding balance in their lives because there have been cutbacks or layoffs where they work. They’re afraid it may happen to them, so they’re putting in more hours,” says psychologist Robert Brooks, PhD, co-author of The Power of Resilience: Achieving Balance, Confidence, and Personal Strength in Your Life.

“But even if you don’t have much control over the hours you have to work, you can ask yourself: In what other ways am I bringing greater enjoyment into my life?” Brooks says. “Focus your time and attention on things you can control.”

Here are five ways to bring a little more balance to your daily routine:

A healthy diet can help the body in its efforts to heal itself, and in some cases, particular foods can lessen the risks of serious illness. To help reduce your risk of some types of cancer, try the following: